DIY coma on-demand, Knock yourself out! Options

[Bodak]

A character with a Pain Editor (M&M.73) and Intelligence 1 (an Ork or Troll shouldn't be too difficult to imagine) activates the Pain Editor, gaining +1 Willpower at the cost of -1 Intelligence.

"Because bioware is created to match the user's physiology, any Attribute bonuses conferred by bioware are treated as natural and unaugmented. In other words, they count as changes to the character's base Attributes." (M&M.77)

So the character now has a natural, unaugmented, Intelligence of zero.

Do you think cybersurgeons require patients to score above a certain threshold on an IQ test prior to implantation to mitigate the risk of litigation but at the cost of being sued for ableism? If not, what happens when such characters activate their implant? Apart from them automatically failing every Perception test (it's worse than the mere +6 to TNs for having the Blind flaw).

[Lionesque]

Sir? I need you to step away from that rulebook. Please, Sir, don't turn this into something we'll all regret, just put the rulebook down and turn away real slow.

Just because a thing *can* exist, it doesn't mean it *must* exist (discounting Rule 34, of course).

Though experiments can be fun, but: Why, and not least, HOW, would a character with an INT of 1 come up with the cash, the idea, and the desire and ability to have a Pain Editor installed?

[pbangarth]

Sir? I need you to step away from that rulebook. Please, Sir, don't turn this into something we'll all regret, just put the rulebook down and turn away real slow.

Just because a thing *can* exist, it doesn't mean it *must* exist (discounting Rule 34, of course).

Though experiments can be fun, but: Why, and not least, HOW, would a character with an INT of 1 come up with the cash, the idea, and the desire and ability to have a Pain Editor installed?

How about : The guy who pays the dumb trog to get in the way of bullets pays for the pain editor.

[Bodak]

Why, and not least, HOW, would a character with an INT of 1 come up with the cash, the idea, and the desire and ability to have a Pain Editor installed?

Well, let's go with Resources: C for the "how" and Magic: A or B for the why...

Troll magicians are not unheard of / unseen in Core.

[Lionesque]

I bow in your general direction, Sir!

[Kren Cooper]

Interesting question.
Personally, I'd go with a dice roll - 1-3, the character just becomes dull, unresponsive and coma-like for D6 hours until the random flickerings of the brain hit the right sequence to deactivate the pain editor via the 'learned reflex', and they return to their normal dullard self.
However, on a 4-6 their *effective* INT drops to 0, they lose all sense of rationality and revert to pure animal instinct - Flight, Fight, Feed or Frak. Gm's discretion in the circumstance as to what happens to the character and how they respond to external stimuli. Fun for all... Lone Star officer turns up to a report of some Orc raiding McRonalds and just eating all the fries... tries to arrest him, turns out the Lone Star officer has a cute butt.... hilarity ensues.

Hell, I could even see an Orc/Troll gang going all in on this, and it's a mark of Initiation that you get this installed, then they go on drug-fuelled benders taking some street drug that lowers your effective Int, then activating this to "unleash the beast" - cage matches, hunts through the city blocks, bets on how many inanimate objects Big Rex will hump before the drugs wear off... so much potential for some real low brow, gritty, *dangerous* street humour from some semi-psychotic pain resistant beasts that could really screw up a quiet little shadowrun when they intersect.

60k is not cheap, but it's not impossible - and I can imagine some dirty chop shop somewhere dealing in 2nd hand ware being affiliated with the gang, installing pain editors in exchange for "salvage rights" on bodies bought in.

Nice one! My smuggler team are going to hate this when they encounter it somewhere. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Cochise]

So the character now has a natural, unaugmented, Intelligence of zero.

... for as long as the implant is active and there's no RAW way of deactivating it besides an implant removal.

Do you think cybersurgeons require patients to score above a certain threshold on an IQ test prior to implantation to mitigate the risk of litigation but at the cost of being sued for ableism?

Medical professionals within the legal part of the societey that are tasked with implanting a paralegal implant on a civilian that could subject them to litigation might be doing it as part of their due diligence when planning the procedure.

Medical professionals within the corporate, govermental / military circuses that implant such implants into their "collegues" will largely do it based on their work contracts and how much worth the involved employer entity puts on the lives of the implant recipients.

Medical professionals in the territories that typically deal with "runners" and other non-SINers? Their worry will largely not be about formal litigation or ableism but only about how the prospect of the particular patient potentially shutting down will affect their reputation within that particular market.

If not, what happens when such characters activate their implant?

1. The first RAW precedence (the "Decrease Attribute" spells) would indicate that upon lowering one of the "mental" attributes to zero the implant user becomes "mindeless" and just "stands around" - pretty similar to the most extreme side-effect cases the real world saw with lobotomies. While the rules of the "Decrease Attribute" spells work quite well with "physical" attributes (0 = some form of physical paralyzation taking hold) the described effect for "mental" attributes is less clear cut and is in conflict with the second RAW precedence.
2. The second RAW precedence (Ghoul transformation rules) contradicts the precedence set by "Decrease Attribute" with regards to "mental" attributes by stating that Ghouls that have their CHA lowered to zero due to the infection (regardless of which stage of the transformation process) will lose their sapience (at least in part) and turn into feral beasts. One could argue that something similar could / should happen when INT drops to zero. As a general reminder: INT values on non-sapient critters are more or less just placeholders for situations where the need for perception tests and limited "reasoning" on the critter's end arise.
3. In line with the first RAW precedence there are other RAW instances that deal with physical attributes being lowered to zero and the effects usually also revolve around being immobilized in one way or another.

Personally I would rule that in this particular situation the implant user should go into a form of "insane" berserk mode since pain is no longer a concern and with INT of 0 there's no real consideration for self-preservation in terms of potential self-harm but at the same time the basic "will to survive" (that happens to be increased by the implant) being at the forefront of whatever is going on in their mind => I'd have them literally attack their environment and fight till until they die or somebody finds a way to restrain them (and possibly find a way to deactivate the implant).

Apart from them automatically failing every Perception test (it's worse than the mere +6 to TNs for having the Blind flaw).

Ignoring further special cases where a character still might have dice for perception tests form other sources: automatically failing perception tests is only a drawback on situations that actually require a perception test.

[Stahlseele]

i had such a character once.
basically he was the metahuman equivalent to a claymore mine.
point at enemy, switch on, run like hell in the other direction untill the screaming stops.
because he was designed as such, i made him very very susceptible to chems like tranquilizers.
if you can get a bead on him, dart him, wait untill he drops and then wait another half hour before
poking with a long stick.

[Bodak]

Why, and not least, HOW, would a character with an INT of 1 come up with the cash, the idea, and the desire and ability to have a Pain Editor installed?

If this was more asking for an in-character rationalisation, I suppose it's the same question as "would anyone living in the racist, terrorist capital of dystopia justifiably require long-term pain management?" and I suspect the answer to that is, yes. For sure, augmentation is way out of the budget of most civilians as per AH:

Your average person won't have a lot of cyberware.

That sounds like a profound statement of the blindingly obvious, but consider it for a moment. For an average household, a piece of completely legal cyberware can consume most of the yearly budget, even on an installment plan.

however we can easily imagine that the school coach who privately celebrates The Night Of Rage conveniently can't find a helmet for a trog on the ice hockey team, the school gets sued for negligence, and the payout covers a Pain Editor. Or how about, parents get frustrated with their kid asking about justice and wanting to protest about poverty and inequality so they absolutely insist that the kid go out on National Youth Terrorism Acceptance Night (31st October) and roam the streets with a bunch of strangers all concealed in masks, vandalising other people's property, emotionally blackmailing them with "trick or treat" that unless they get rewarded for their threats, they will perform acts of terrorism designed to inure them against questioning the acts of terrorism they see their government performing on the world stage. It's not unheard of for property owners to defend their assets against such trespassing antagonists with whatever dissuasion seems necessary this year, and inevitably the criminals get injured. "But they're innocent children just having a bit of harmless fun, just like when our tanks steamroll over civilians near oil fields or when we decimate sacred forests to build a factory it's all just a bit of harmless fun!" and so on and so on, the parents protest on so-called "social media" and start up an online campaign ranting at people who defend their property against juvenile delinquents and the donations flood in and sponsorship funds a Pain Editor.

When thinking about such things, one must always start from Premise Zero which is that everybody is mad. From that point, you can usually reason in any direction and discover that the ludicrous scenarios you just dreamt up have striking resemblance to some report in the news or some trope in fiction.

... for as long as the implant is active and there's no RAW way of deactivating it besides an implant removal.

That was my concern! Although I do like Kren's suggestion of them thrashing around in a seizure until some random spasm fires the reflex that deactivates the implant. Perhaps set this a base time of Essence hours, divided by number of successes on a Karma Pool test against some TN (4 maybe).

The first RAW precedence (the "Decrease Attribute" spells) would indicate that upon lowering one of the "mental" attributes to zero

A salient difference I believe in this case though is that bioware results in a natural, unaugmented attribute rating (M&M.77) (of zero, in this case). Similarly, "Note that the Attribute increases a physical adept receives [...] are treated as natural, not augmented, ratings." (SR3.41)

In contrast, "Care must be taken to distinguish between natural, unmodified Attribute Ratings and those augmented by cyberware and magic." (SR3.41) "Any changes to these Attributes from spells or cyberware will result in ratings known as augmented Attributes. Augmented Attribute Ratings are noted in parentheses after the natural Attribute Rating." (SR3.56) so I believe that the Increase/Decrease Attribute spells would cause an augmented attribute rating of zero. There may not be a huge functional difference between (bioware and Adept powers giving unaugmented ratings) and (spells or cyberware giving augmented ratings) but it seems to me that the augmentated ratings are sort of one step further away from the natural state (like the benefits conferred by a drug) whereas unaugmented ratings are more integral.

I hadn't even considered the ghoul case. Good one! I had thought the character might effectively become just a cactus capable of acting as an organ donor that would never regain sapience (the beasties in Critters list Int of higher than that) but yes, a ghoul does set something of a precedent. So if we Cultured a Pain Editor to match the physiology of a ghoul with Cha 0 and Int 1, we could end up with two mental attributes at natural, unaugmented ratings of zero.

Personally I would rule that in this particular situation the implant user should go into a form of "insane" berserk mode since pain is no longer a concern and with INT of 0 there's no real consideration for self-preservation in terms of potential self-harm but at the same time the basic "will to survive" (that happens to be increased by the implant) being at the forefront of whatever is going on in their mind => I'd have them literally attack their environment and fight till until they die or somebody finds a way to restrain them (and possibly find a way to deactivate the implant).

That seems apt, and quite viable for Kren's concept NPC. Were this a piece of cyberware impeding their Intelligence, jamming into their datajack might give you a chance of shutting it off. Likewise, if it were a spell, pushing them through a ward or into your buddy's shamanic lodge should dislodge it. But as bioware... it's pretty tricky to defeat.

Ignoring further special cases where a character still might have dice for perception tests form other sources: automatically failing perception tests is only a drawback on situations that actually require a perception test.

I imagine activating the implant being like tunnel vision that takes up 1/Int of the radius of your visual field. It's just that when you only start with Intelligence 1, that "tunnel vision" occupies all of your visual field and you're "seeing red" in your feral haze. If fog and mist and smoke and dim light impose enough potential for perception modifiers that a Perception test can be called for, a Perception test could be called for for someone experiencing such a state. You're rampaging! Make a Perception check to run through the door, or to claw your opponent, or make it down the steps without falling, or to recognise that you've been tearing laps around this same room for the past five minutes. The TN is only 2 and you just need 1 success. Hmm... you don't notice, and you keep going...

[Cochise]

A salient difference I believe in this case though is that bioware results in a natural, unaugmented attribute rating (M&M.77) (of zero, in this case). Similarly, "Note that the Attribute increases a physical adept receives [...] are treated as natural, not augmented, ratings." (SR3.41)

In terms of those spells being a rule precedence I would say that this distinction is a bit "irrelevant" because ...

In contrast, "Care must be taken to distinguish between natural, unmodified Attribute Ratings and those augmented by cyberware and magic." (SR3.41) "Any changes to these Attributes from spells or cyberware will result in ratings known as augmented Attributes. Augmented Attribute Ratings are noted in parentheses after the natural Attribute Rating." (SR3.56) so I believe that the Increase/Decrease Attribute spells would cause an augmented attribute rating of zero. There may not be a huge functional difference between (bioware and Adept powers giving unaugmented ratings) and (spells or cyberware giving augmented ratings) but it seems to me that the augmentated ratings are sort of one step further away from the natural state (like the benefits conferred by a drug) whereas unaugmented ratings are more integral.

... the spell description deals with situations where the "augmented" attribute (which always includes the "natural" part) reaches an effective value 0. As such those spells certainly serve as a precedence where the "natural" attribute reaches 0 along with the "decreased augmented attribute".

That seems apt, and quite viable for Kren's concept NPC. Were this a piece of cyberware impeding their Intelligence, jamming into their datajack might give you a chance of shutting it off. Likewise, if it were a spell, pushing them through a ward or into your buddy's shamanic lodge should dislodge it. But as bioware... it's pretty tricky to defeat.

Well, there's two aspects to this:

• Do you really want to be a stickler for unaltered RAW in that particular case or is this a case that warrants invoking "golden rule No. 1"?
• Provided that you deem the situation worthy of some form of house ruling, how easy / tricky do you want it to be since part of the pain editor's use case is the ability of its user to become more or less completely immune to "enhanced interrogation" based on physical pain. If disabling the implant becomes something that can be done fairly easy, then entities on any side of "the law" will have some degree of access to it and could thus negate this particular use case as well.

I imagine activating the implant being like tunnel vision that takes up 1/Int of the radius of your visual field. It's just that when you only start with Intelligence 1, that "tunnel vision" occupies all of your visual field and you're "seeing red" in your feral haze. If fog and mist and smoke and dim light impose enough potential for perception modifiers that a Perception test can be called for, a Perception test could be called for for someone experiencing such a state. You're rampaging! Make a Perception check to run through the door, or to claw your opponent, or make it down the steps without falling, or to recognise that you've been tearing laps around this same room for the past five minutes. The TN is only 2 and you just need 1 success. Hmm... you don't notice, and you keep going...

Which is more or less in line with what I described as my approcah with the difference that I wouldn't necessarily ask for a Perception Test to see which aspect of their surroundings the implant user attacks. I'd more or less make that a random "dicision" (a die roll - may based on the grenade scatter table) to identify the direction in which the target of the rampage is located and the closest object / person in that direction simply becomes "the target". The target could be a wall, a door, an inanimate object or any character (PC or NPC). The implant user would keep attacking said randomly chosen target until one of three things happens:

1. The implant user more or less destroys their target and then randomly switches to the next target (whether or not I'd re-roll the direction would be an ad-hoc GM fiat)
2. The implant user is killed / incapacitated for whatever reason
3. A trigger condition applies that you may have set for a return to an "implant off" state (should you opt for a house rule) - thereby ending the rampage (but not necessarily an ongoing engagement with a living person that doesn't recognize the change in state or simply doesn't care enough to break off the engagement)

[Lionesque]

When thinking about such things, one must always start from Premise Zero which is that everybody is mad. From that point, you can usually reason in any direction and discover that the ludicrous scenarios you just dreamt up have striking resemblance to some report in the news or some trope in fiction.

Not sure what surprises me more, your understanding of the game mechanics or your cynicism. Either way, I'm impressed. And slightly depressed that you may be absolutely correct re. Premise Zero.

[Kagetenshi]

From a GM’s perspective I’d probably assume it deactivates periodically, probably in the 10-30 hour range (and probably timed by one of the ultradian-circadian-infradian rhythms, so inexact). It could be reactivated immediately, but would need to be.

There is no canon support I’m aware of for this, though, so “eternal coma” (until surgical extraction or destruction by Stress) is a plausible alternative. I don’t think the Ghoul rules can be generalized, since they seem to be addressing the existence of both mindless and ordinary-intelligence (small “i”) ghouls with a mechanic that can produce both.

~J

[Stahlseele]

Hmm . . does magic or drugs count for the improved or the natural attribute?
If they affect the natural and do not create an improved attribute, then there
you have it.
Cast intelligence or drug with mentats and you have your buddy back.

[Bodak]

Hmm . . does magic or drugs count for the improved or the natural attribute?

"Care must be taken to distinguish between natural, unmodified Attribute Ratings and those augmented by cyberware and magic." (SR3.41) "Any changes to these Attributes from spells or cyberware will result in ratings known as augmented Attributes. Augmented Attribute Ratings are noted in parentheses after the natural Attribute Rating." (SR3.56)

[Tiralee]

Huh.

And here's me thinking the topic was going to be along the lines of an Auto-injector filled with Rum.

[Bodak]

The table on page 19 of Critters also includes basic stats for all the metahuman races.

and

In SSG on page 49 Androgyne mentions quickening a shapechange spell on himself that changed their sex for a year.

as endorsed by the SR4FAQ:

humans are, strictly speaking, non-paranormal animals. Metahumans and metavariants are paranormal

So a Human with a Pain Editor could become a non-paranormal animal with Natural Intelligence of zero.

To be Sentient means:

having the power of perception by the senses

and an Intelligence of zero means zero dice to make any Perception checks.

So a Human with a Pain Editor could become a non-sentient, non-paranormal animal.

Magic in the Shadows p108 says:

Inhabiting

In this case, the magician provides a suitable host body for the ally. The host body can be either a non-sentient and non-Awakened animal or a homunculus.

The summoner can provide an animal host, using any normal critter for this purpose. Awakened critters are too magically powerful to be used as hosts, as are sapient beings (such as people). The ally adds its Force to the physical Attributes of the host animal and uses its own mental Attributes.

To be Sapient means something quite different:

having or showing great wisdom, sound judgment, or self-awareness

I suggest that a being with zero Intelligence is not capable of "showing great wisdom or sound judgment" and the scenarios where Intelligence zero results in a coma or a combat frenzy regardless of one's own welfare could indicate that self-awareness would be lost, too.

So you could take a Bod 6 / Qck 6 / Str 6 / Int 1 human with a Pain Editor for the low-low price of a Level 3 Contact. Then you could purchase Spell Points until you have 50 of them. Then you could conjure a Force 5 Ally to inhabit the human and hey-presto, it's got physical attributes of 11, mental attributes of its creator, the ability to equip high security armour without penalty, while looking like the most generic citizen.

Now, your basic human is between 3 and 25 feet tall, and is made of a hairy, oily goo wrapped in a t-shirt.

Although you can't Dikote it, Inhabitation does bestow immunity to age and pathogens which would be a real bonus.